


Night Winds

by Tammany



Series: The Sussex Downs [11]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Quiet, Transition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-10-01 17:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20355589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This is very much just a modulation of things. Mycroft and Angel/Aziraphale meet on the access path at night, and bond a little.No promise of more. Just a chance to sort out one beat I did know had to be sorted before the next could be done.





	Night Winds

The evening was magic—the scent of the downs, the crash of the ocean, the flutter of the breeze—sharp enough to warrant changing out of his summer clothing to a light country tweed in a modified shooting cut that flattered his figure without destroying the sense of relaxed holiday comfort.

Mycroft sighed happily, and tucked a pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket. Lestrade would scold him later—and then lick the faint traces from his lips, chase the memory of smoke deep. They would share brandy. Perhaps both have another fag out on the veranda, before a shared shower and then to bed. In the meantime, though, this walk was his.

John and Rosie had been bedded down in the cottage again, and Mycroft chose for many reasons to ignore the fact that Sherlock was not sleeping alone in his favorite guest bedroom in the big house. The angel’s pot of oyster stew just kept on giving and giving, a cornucopia of richness, which had made Mycroft very happy, but ultimately sent John and Greg racing to the kitchen for any other leftovers. Sherlock and Janine had sampled warily, with Janine ultimately concluding that she’d had stronger sushi or bouillabaisse, and that she thought she’d grow into it—and Sherlock, who had once told Mycroft he’d rather eat a booger than an oyster, agreeing with her—and who knew if he was now converted to oysters, or only to Janine?

Rosie, quiet and shaken, had found a place near Mycroft, to his surprise. She’d snuck her hand out and grabbed the tail of his shirt, using her spare to sip at a teacup of oyster stew, taking mouse-like samples.

“You don’t have to drink it if you don’t like it, my dear,” Mycroft told her, with the politesse he usually reserved for Her Majesty or for foreign dignities.

She shook her head. “Good. Warm. Angel made it.” Then fell silent again, until asking for seconds a quarter hour or so later. Then, her cup refilled, she said, “Where’s Mr. Crowley?”

“Resting,” Mycroft told her, feeling that probably was as far as he dared get in communicating Angel-Demon relations with John Watson’s six-year-old daughter. “He was quite tired after this afternoon.”

She nodded.

He wondered what she’d say about the afternoon if he asked. He suspected, though, that she’d prefer he not ask. She didn’t bring it up herself.

John had led her down to the cottage in a vastly low mood.

Mycroft decided to do the unspeakable, and call his security teams, ordering the cottage cameras to run and the team to watch. He didn’t trust John Watson and his deadly pistol. The man was depressed, and would not take care of himself—perhaps he could not. But Mycroft was determined he would not be putting up with his brother’s friend causing any more melodrama on this trip, even if he had to have him strapped into a straight jacket and sectioned at one of the many clinics he’d located for Sherlock over the years.

Thus his need for a quiet walk in the lovely night.

One suck on the cigarette—the familiar hacking cough that was triggered no matter how regularly or rarely he indulged. The cautious test to determine how much smoke he could endure—and the rush as his body moaned into the nicotine.

“Oh, yesssssssss.” He hissed it, in pleasure and release.

“Crowley?” Angel’s voice was hesitant and uncertain. “Is that you?”

As though she were almost sure he was not—but not quite sure enough to dare not greeting her beloved, just in case.

“No,” he said, softly. “Mycroft. Next door. Having my first cigarette in…” he tallied it up. “Three weeks, five days, and roughly eight hours. I am afraid I resist temptation badly, when it comes to nicotine.” His eyes, accustomed to the dark, found her standing on the access path, looking out over the ocean—her wings tented up and wrapped around her, like a woman’s shawl. “Are you cold, my dear?”

She shrugged—an interesting gesture when it involved shoulders, arms, wings, and spine all at once. “It’s been a hard day.” She leaned down and picked up a bottle of brandy. “My own preferred vice. Have some?”

Mycroft was considering the savagery of drinking it from the bottle, when Angel produced a pair of glasses from thin air.

“Magic,” Mycroft murmured.

“Actually,” she said, her voice oddly shaped, blending misery and glee, “it’s stage magic. Illusion. Presti-digitation!” She made great work of the last, seeming to taste the syllables. “Sleight of hannnnnd.” She held her glass out, and Mycroft poured it a quarter full, leaving room for the brandy to bloom in the snifter.

“I’m surprised a…what do you call yourselves?”

“Depends on the audience,” Angel said. “Celestials is useful if you want to talk about me and Crowley.”

“Does he do stage magic, too?”

Angel gave a tinkling laugh, fond and at the same time sad. “Oh, dear heavens. Don’t let him hear you! He hates it. Hates that I do it. He says it’s humiliating.”

Mycroft’s mind never did stop deducing.

The demon was serious. He wished the Angel didn’t perform stage magic. He endured it because he loved her. She used it because she delighted in it—and, secretly, because he endured it, and his endurance was precious to her. Sometimes we most value what we are forgiven: the joke told many times too many, the old stories that have been worn bare, the weaknesses we can’t ever quite defeat. The smoke that will be licked from our lips—tenderly. So tenderly…

“Good brandy,” he said.

“Napoleon.”

“Color me impressed.”

“It’s easy to accomplish when you’ve learned over the years to stock up while you can.”

They fell silent for a time, Mycroft sipping brandy and smoking his cigarette, Angel just enjoying the brandy alone.

Mycroft felt something building in his little Angelic neighbor. He let it. He had not developed his reputation by being incapable of shutting his mouth and waiting. At last…

“Crowley’s asleep.”

“He was badly overextended today.”

“Very much.” She sounded so sad…”We don’t have to sleep, you know. I seldom do. More time to read. Do research. Learn things. Go out and try—oh, so much. Sometimes I jump from London to Beijing just to try the street food. Or in New Delhi. Or anywhere, really. So much to see, and it will all end someday, no matter what we do. I hate to lose any of it. But he loves his sleep.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“Sometimes.”

“Tonight?”

“Perhaps. A bit.”

“Mmmm.” The wind fluttered softly, and he was glad of the warmth of his tweed. “Do you mind if I sit?” he asked…as he would a dignitary he trusted to forgive him if it was a particular breech of etiquette.

“Quite! Please, do. I’ll even miracle it, if you get something nasty and entirely too shore-side on your suit. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Good heavens no. Please do. Let me freshen your glass.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” The angel gave him a droll smile, flirtatious without being inviting, as though banter were a human skill he’d mastered well enough to be quite chuffed with himself. (See me! See me! I shall banter and make oyster stew and pull a golden sovereign out of your ear! What a clever chap I am!)

Perhaps not clever, Mycroft thought, doting just a little. He was suspicious that the woman was devastatingly brilliant—leaving Mummy panting in her wake, and even Sherlock and Mycroft falling behind. But she didn’t seem clever—that was her demon’s purview, he suspected.

“Will he be better with rest?”

She nodded, gazing at her snifter. “As much better as he can be. We’re both over 6000 years old. It’s hardly been an easy time. I daresay neither of us are without a bit of…patina. But he Fell, you see.”

Mycroft thought with anguish of his brother, falling…

“Why?”

“Asked too much. At least—that’s most of what he’ll say. One worries, though. He’s…not safe alone with himself, sometimes.”

“Mmmm. Rather like Sherlock. And…John, for that matter.”

She looked at him side-eyed, eyes just dark enough blue to make out in the dim, setting off the whites of her eyes. “Today was hard on him. It’s been rather a hard dozen years, actually. It upsets him to see people who are careless with children.”

“Careless?” he considered. “I think John is not so much careless as ill-prepared to judge what needs attention and what does not. He’s got…history.”

The Angel nodded, and said in a way that suggested tart annoyance, “What a surprise. I never would have thought it.”

Mycroft considered, and said, “Rather a lot less history than you two deal with?”

Angel gave a sulky, grumbly little noise, highlighted with a trace of shame and regret. “Bother. It’s hardly you humans’ fault that you don’t have to deal with eternity. But there it is. I suppose I do rather resent how that young man flops around getting himself in deeper while pretending it’s not happening. Quite juvenile.”

“I daresay both of us are. Most of us humans. A decade of bad news to us seems close to a life time.”

“Mmm.”

Again they fell silent. Mycroft poured out more brandy. Angel sighed softly, and looked back over her shoulder.

“Sleeping,” she said, apparently sure from the state of the house and its lights. Then she ruined it. “At least, I do hope so. He could have gone out in the Bentley.”

“Hardly a quiet option, surely? That old beast of his won’t be silent.”

“Unless he wants it to be. It would run on fairy dust and moonshine if he wanted it to.”

“You’re sure he’ll be all right?”

“He’s…Crowley.” The angel’s voice grew sadder, and a trace more drunk. “’He’s very brave, and very silly, and I think for a time he’s going to be very sad.’ But—“

He didn’t manage to complete it. Mycroft cut him off. “The Doctor. Twelfth. Capaldi. The Return of Doctor Mysterio.”

The angel clapped her hands. “Oh, you watch! More fun than when Will let Dogberry loose in ‘Much Ado.’”

She sparkled—all those twirly curls, and the moonlight on them, and the pale period plaid dress. She was quintessentially female. Except, of course, she wasn't. She was genderless...,Mycroft blinked. She confused his wiring so much: his own personal version of fairy-tale femininity and…something else.

“My partner saw yours change, hrmmm…gender this morning. By mistake. He said he looks like Sherlock a bit—and a bit like a woman named Irene Adler.”

She said nothing, just smiled.

“Do you—do you change, too?” Curiosity was a terrible thing in a Holmes.

“Yes.”

“But you prefer a woman’s body?”

"Good heavens, no!” Angel straightened, appearing a bit horrified. “I’ve done it, I mean. I mean, really—6000 years. You’d have to be incurious as…as…as that oaf the Americans seem to have, oh, what’s the word? Presidentiated?”

“Inaugurated,” Mycroft drawled, in bitter distaste. “You don’t prefer it? Then you wear it for your partner?”

“Goodness. I hardly think…” The angel stopped and considered, and then pouted. “No. But he found me the most marvelous pink plaid.” She got a dreamy, infatuated glow on her face, and her vision drifted somewhere back in time. “He thought I’d look pretty in them. So we decided to go to the beach. After? History, I suppose. And I do think I look quite good in it. It seemed a small thing to change to suit what he found me. And as long as he’s happy, why change back?”

Oh, my. Deducations on that, too. “How long has it been?”

“A year? A bit over…”

“Oh. My. Ermmm…that long?”

“Compared to eternity?”

“Yes. Right. Um…and you don’t mind?”

The angel’s look was ambivalent. At last she said, “I love him. And it’s not like any body is 'authentic' on me." She snapped her fingers.

Suddenly a man sat on the sand. Mycroft would have known him in a second. Something about him rang more clear and convincing than Angel.

“I like the suit,” he said.

She—no, he brightened. “Oh, and I quite like yours,” he chirped. “Who is your tailor?”

“Ravensbruch. Private. Quite new. Incredible talent. And you—that can’t be new, can it?”

“No, no. A favorite. Quite a classic.”

“I can see. You’ve kept it well.”

“One tries.” He was squirming like a beautiful, adorable happy puppy. He had nothing on Mycroft’s Greg…but he was radiant. “Crowley’s the fashion horse. But I do make an attempt. One would prefer to keep up appearances if one could. But it’s hardly a suit for the seaside.” He ducked his head. “You do rather well, even when it’s hot. I don’t think I’ve had to make that sort of choice in, oh…forever. And this body looks so sad in shorts...”

“You’d look good in linens and peasants shirts,” Mycroft said…and was rewarded with a meltingly grateful glance.

“Oh, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Mycroft said. “I’d be happy to help, if you like. In the meantime, miracle yourself copies of my linen drawstring pants and try Salwar Kameez. Kind to a more lush figure.

Long after, Aziraphale said, softly, “He loves children.”

“I see. Greg, too.”

“Yes. I’ll—talk to Crowley.”

“Thank you. I think John’s just—fragile.”

“Yes….”

“Earth can be hard on her children.”

“And God on hers.”

“Well, yes. There is that.”

Aziraphale chuckled, then, suddenly, his mood lightening. “And mine’s asleep and yours is waiting for you. Go home, Mr. Holmes. Wake yours if you must, and make the most of the years you’re given.”

Mycroft scrambled up—and offered a hand to pull the other to his feet. He touched one lapel, gingerly.

“An angel,” he said, the awe rising up again.

“Six days a week and half-days on Sunday.” The angel was smiling, now. Interesting, he thought…I’ve never been a proper Patron before…I wonder if it’s like being a Godfather?

And, filled with a sense of his own role in the world—Principality, Guardian of The British Government--he toddled on up the hill to see if Crowley would like his lover back in his male body, or not.


End file.
